A more or less accurate measure of class in America is TV size: the bigger your TV, the lower your class.

Understanding the past requires pretending that you don't know the present. It requires feeling its own pressure on your pulses without any ex post facto illumination.

All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel

Irony is the attendant of hope and the fuel of hope is innocence.

The simple is carefully shunned by those who labour to seem what they would be.

The wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.

Exploration belongs to the Renaissance, travel to the bourgeois age, tourism to our proletarian moment.The explorer seeks theundiscovered, the traveler that which has been discovered by the mind working in history,the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity.If the explorer moves toward the risks of the formless and the unknown, the tourist moves toward the security of pure cliché. It is between these two poles that the traveler mediates.